One of the main virtues of The sympathizer (Max) is that for those of us who began the descent a long time ago, it takes us back to the time of youth protests against the Vietnam War, times of burning the Stars and Stripes, of more or less multitudinous demonstrations and of ideological certainties in which reflection was unnecessary when possessing the absolute truth.
And another of the series’ virtues is, precisely, that its creators, Park Chan-wook and Don McKellar, who adapted the eponymous novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen for which he won the Pulitzer in 2015, propose exactly the opposite: that nothing is what it seems and that the radical dichotomies of good and evil also prevent a lucid analysis of recent history. To all this we must add that Robert Downey Jr., one of its protagonists, must have had a great time in a series in which he plays four different roles: an agent of the merciless CIA, a university professor, a US congressman and an egocentric film director. In addition, in some of the sequences, and thanks to technology, he plays three of his roles at the same time. An interpretive display by one of Hollywood’s “bad boys” redeemed by his talent.
An excellent series from a bygone era in which a North Vietnamese spy infiltrates the South Vietnamese army and is forced, like part of the high command of the South Vietnamese army, to go into exile in the United States and rethink everything he had believed in and fought for in his life. From certainties to uncertainty.
And speaking of certainties, we must recognize that the second season of the Norwegian Beforeigners (The visitors) also debunks a questionable assumption: that whoever watches it, at least the one who signs the comment, is able to understand what is thrown at him. Well, no. The episodes of the second season that can be seen on SkyShowtime and Movistar Plus+, with about flashbacks from the present to more than a thousand years ago, they perhaps achieve what their leaders wanted: that they do not understand, which in certain brains is a sign of distinction. As Corporal Gutiérrez says very well in the wonderful It’s dawning, which is no small thingfrom the late José Luis Cuerda: “I can’t stand this mess!”
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